CULTURAL EXPERIENCE OF THE JENI: A CULTURE HIDDEN FROM VIEW
- 22.03.2023
- Practical Project
The Yenish Cultural Event raises awareness and promotes the exchange of ideas about minority cultures in Austria.
An event for Austria's largest non-recognized minority – the Yenish – was organized by students. The aim was to create a place for people to meet and exchange ideas, as well as to prevent prejudices.
In February 2023, a unique practical project of the University of Applied Sciences Kufstein Tirol took place in the Kufstein cultural quarter. The aim of the project was to promote awareness and exchange about Yenish culture in Austria.
The Yenish people were discriminated against and persecuted in the past. The Yenish – often referred to disparagingly in Tyrol as Karrner or Laninger – were scissors grinders, tinkers or traders who traveled around the country. This led to the persecution and murder of this ethnic group during the Nazi era.
The Yenish retreated, adapted and began to deny their origins. But the ethnic group has developed its own culture, language and craftsmanship. And it is the largest unrecognized minority in Austria. An association wants to change this and is fighting for this recognition.
The project team, consisting of students from the bachelor's degree program in Sports, Culture & Event Management, had become aware of the fate of the Yenish and wanted to offer them a stage. Through contact with the Yenish Association in Austria, the students realized how difficult it is to be recognized as a minority and how deeply rooted the fear of discrimination still is.
THE EVENT CULTURAL EXPERIENCE Yenish
The event “Cultural Experience Yenish” is about the restitution of human dignity for this minority, which has always been forgotten in Austria. The event brought the Yenish before the curtain. The event passed with a reading of Simone Schönett (from the novel “Other chords”), a lecture by Mag. Dr. Horst Schreiber on the fate of the Yenish and a musical interlude by Marco Buckovez, who presented Yenish music. An ORF documentary “Heimat fremde Heimat” was also integrated into the program.
The event was intended to help break down prejudices and strengthen the minority. 70 guests attended the cultural evening and experienced a presentation of the Yenish culture in Tyrol.
“The event was a great success and shows how important it is to give minorities a voice and to celebrate their culture,” said the organizing student group.
“We are just the event team and we want to create a space for encounters, information and education, but not to place ourselves above the minority and present them,” the students, who come from Vienna, Lower Austria, Bavaria and Tyrol, clarify.
WHO ARE THE Yenish?
- Yenish live in Austria and throughout Europe
- They are the largest unrecognized minority in Tyrol
- They are a transnational minority that has so far only been officially recognized in Switzerland
- The European Yenish Council estimates the number of Yenish people in Europe at around 500,000
- The Yenish have their own language, Yenish
- The Yenish culture is an orally transmitted one and has so far hardly found its way into historiography
The Yenish have been shaped by a past of discrimination, exclusion and poverty, but also of assimilation and integration, of total adaptation to the point of cultural forgetting.
The Yenish have a wide range of cultural diversity, from crafts to music to their own language. Perceived as “outlaws” and “travelling people” in the Middle Ages, as “homeless” and “non-resident” in the 19th and 20th centuries, and finally as an “invisible ethnic group” in the 21st century, they are now fighting for official recognition of their history and their existence in Austria.